Careers 2.0 is now in German (and localized for the UK). What have we messed up?

We’ve been hard at work localizing Careers 2.0 for the German and UK markets. UK users won’t see much difference other than currency updates to allow employers to pay in GBP. German users will see a straight translation of the site, and currency updates to allow employers to pay in EUROS.

Our team would love help finding bugs as we put the final touches on both new sites. Specifically, we can anticipate problems related to:

@TRiG that page says Ukraine is UA, not UG. (separating this into two comments so I can do two notifications)
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Pops♦Dec 14 '12 at 15:49

It also says that the United Kingdom is GB, as @Christopher said. There is no UK.
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Pops♦Dec 14 '12 at 15:51

@PopularDemand. You're right. I was scanning the rows incorrectly. UG is Uganda. The GB abbreviation is used in IVR codes and at the Olympics, but the country is generally known as the UK, even in the DNS system (famously the only deviation in the DNS from the ISO).
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TRiG is Timothy Richard GreenDec 14 '12 at 16:09

@TRiG and rightly so, since the modern UK includes Northern Ireland, which is (of course) not located on the island of Great Britain. But since you brought up 3166, I figured it was worth pointing out.
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Pops♦Dec 14 '12 at 16:16

@PopularDemand. And, in the Olympics, athletes from Northern Ireland can choose to represent either Ireland or the UK (Team GB, they brand themselves, in spite of the presense of NI athletes). Boxers from the North were on Team Ireland at the 2012 London Games: Paddy Barnes and the very cute Michael Conlan. (And I don't mean "surprisingly good looking for a boxer"; I mean cuuuute.)
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TRiG is Timothy Richard GreenDec 14 '12 at 16:30

12 Answers
12

"Jobbezeichnung, Keyword oder Fir…" in the search box is cut off and contains "Keyword", which seems misplaced here. Maybe consider removing "Keyword" altogether or replacing it with "Tag". I'm sure most German speaking people would know what a tag is.

For some reason I can't log into Careers using my OpenID, so I can't check more pages, I'm afraid.
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slhckNov 22 '12 at 8:14

3

Not sure I agree with the "Toptalente" thing and the last point, but those are probably a matter of taste. The rest is spot on.
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balpha♦Nov 22 '12 at 8:20

Could very well be a localized thing. "Uns liegt nichts" makes it sound like "Screw your money!" to me. As for "Toptalente", you're probably right (see § 37 E4, Neue Deutsche Rechtschreibung).
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slhckNov 22 '12 at 8:26

"Top-Talente" is more readable in my opinion, I read "Topftalente" first. Additionally I would say "Durchsuchen Sie über 83.000 Profile..." without the "+" sign. It is as we say in Germany "Doppelt gemoppelt..."
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SpontifixusNov 22 '12 at 8:44

I didn't expect it to be spelt "correctly" @Benjol :-), I can only hope.
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ben is uǝq backwardsNov 27 '12 at 22:02

2

He who writes "Top-Talente" must also write "Top-Stellenangebote". He who writes "Top Stellenangebote" must also write "Top Talente" (then go back to grade school, then write it properly).
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ЯegDwightNov 27 '12 at 22:45

Login page

The English version says "Don’t have an account yet? Create a new account", the German one says "Haben Sie schon ein Konto? Neues Konto erstellen". That makes no sense, it means "Do you have an account already? Create a new one". Correction "Haben Sie noch kein Konto?"

The snippet "Ihre OpenID-Angaben vergessen?" below the login buttons sounds a bit strange. I would either make it shorter to be "OpenID-Angaben vergessen?", or turn in into an actual sentence with "Haben Sie Ihre OpenID-Angaben vergessen?"

CV

Unfortunatly "bearbeiten" is longer than "edit", causing the section editing links to overlap with the content (screenshot)

/de/employer

Terms of service

Both in the footer and on the actual page, "Terms of service" has been translated as "Allgemeine Geschäftsbedingungen". Most websites would call this "Nutzungsbedingungen". IANAL, but I think there may actual be legal implications from calling it "Allgemeine Geschäftsbedingungen", and since this page is obviously a direct translation of the English version of the general Stack Exchange TOS, and not a rewrite into Germany-specific legalese, this may not be intentional. Maybe get some legal advice on this.

Section 4, paragraph 2, sentence 1: Everything in this sentence relates to "Die Verwendung", so the verbs have to be singular (e.g. "gefährdet" instead of "gefährden"). To capture the meaning of the original English sentence however, I would actually go with this instead:

@syntaxerror re "nobody would say derzeit" -- I would. Please consider that your particular style of German may not be everyone's (I wouldn't have a problem with "zur Zeit" either, though).
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balpha♦Nov 4 '13 at 6:40

Yes I consider. (Of course.) Nevertheless, my point about the changing of "Gesetzeskollisionen" stays. That IS translationese.
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syntaxerrorNov 5 '13 at 18:16

When searching for "Köln", one gets a message that it is an unknown location - but if the search term is "Cologne" (the English name), there are 4 results for "Köln, Deutschland"!

German postal codes do not yield job listings in German cities; rather, Careers assumes it's a US zip code. (See the example of 10969, which is one of Berlin's postal codes, but the search results are for Orange, NY.)

(I'd really love to print out the pages, scribble in them with a red pen and scan them back in, but you'd probably butcher me for that. Also the margins tend to be too small for elaborate proofs notes. This might come across as overly picky and it probably is as I tend to concern myself not just with spelling but also consistency and typographical problems. But you asked :-))

I'd call “Keywords” “Stichworte” instead. There is no reason to use the English term here.

“Treffer durchsuchen” is just plain wrong. It's a valid, but contextually wrong translation for “Search hits”. Although I'm not really sure of a proper translation right now. Maybe something along the lines of “Durch Suchanfragen gefunden” – still sounds icky, but at least describes what is meant.

No translation of recent searches, even though those should be easy to translate as they are not exactly free-form strings:

When searching for jobs from a particular company (e.g. by following a link from the front page) the number of jobs isn't quite right. It says “«num» «company name» Stellen” which works out ok in English but is downright horrible in German, introducing several Deppenleerzeichen due to differences in how compund words are constructed in the two languages. Technically correct would be “«num» «company-name»-Stellen” which is likely unfeasible for a number of reasons (since it requires a hyphen between every word of the company name). Better yet (and easier to implement) would be “«num» Stellen bei «company name»” which side-steps the issue by not replicating the exact template from the English version. Yes, i18n is fun sometimes :-)

“Derzeit «position» in «employer».” sounds quite wrong. At least for my case. I certainly don't work in a company, I work bei a company. In would be more appropriate for actual geographic places, not abstract entities you happen to be a part of.

Some labels are just way too long in German, e.g. under Zertifizierung. Adding soft hyphens can help, although I'm not sure about the browser compatibility implications.

Stack Exchange section, you choose not just one site, you can choose multiple, but the wording specifically refers to just one site:

Date ranges are written with an en dash (U+2013) in German, e.g. “2006–2011” (not “2006 - 2011”). Since this obviously doesn't really work for dates in standard (ISO 8601) format or written dates, e.g. “September 2011” the usual solution is to use “bis” between them: “September 2009 bis Januar 2010” (instead of “September 2009 - Januar 2010 ”).

Similarly, “März 2012 - Aktuell” sounds stupid, as “Aktuell” isn't exactly a date. Better would be “seit März 2011” (a change that would be quite nice in English as well where the current construct doesn't read as nice as it could too). This could be changed on the CV view as well.

“Pdf erstellen” → “PDF erstellen”. It's an acronym, after all, not a normal noun. The English version side-steps the issue by just lower-casing everything.

The visibility and privacy settings in the right sidebar seem to cope poorly with the longer words:

The hint under textarea: “Dieses Textfeld unterstützt die Formatierung Markdown.” might be better to change into “Dieses Textfeld unterstützt Markdown-Formatierung.” (which is also a more direct translation from the original text).

“Eine Anwendung hinzufügen...” is missing a space before the ellipsis.

“Profil aktualisiert heute” uses English word order. The German variant would be “Profil heute aktualisiert”. Better yet, because we like being wordy and include lots of words for no apparent reason at all: “Das Profil wurde heute zuletzt aktualisiert.”. It's just a small note in the border that doesn't clash with anything, so being wordy doesn't hurt here (although it might introduce problems with longer words since the line length isn't that long).

Works also with “gestern”, “vor 2 Wochen”, “irgendwann letztes Jahr” and “im Mittelalter”.

Same issue in the Stack Exchange section: “Zuletzt angeschaut heute” should be “Heute zuletzt angeschaut”.

Messages

“«name» hat geantwortet: «answer» und geschrieben”. Since the two possible «answer»s are interessiert and nicht interessiert this could be solved more elegantly as “«name» ist «answer» und hat geschrieben:”. Note also that the employer's template has a trailing colon while the user's does not. This should probably also be consistent.

“• Zeigen, wie begeistert andere von Ihrer Arbeit sind” should probably read “uns zeigen, wie ...”, for consistency with the first bullet point and because it looks/sounds strange there. I know it's a continuation of the text part before the list, but still.

“• Nutzen Sie die Einladungen, die Sie haben!”. Did I say continuation of the text before the list? Oh, that was only for two of the three bullet points. Eek! Please, a little more consistency.

Extra strangeness: The button below reads “Teilbare Verlinkung erstellen”. Probably because “sharebar” looks even less like a word. Except maybe as a brand name for chocolate bars intended to be shared. Or something.

Candidate search

General

Kudos for (mostly) using ellipses properly. Not a complaint, not a correction, just being happy about a rare case of people knowing how to use spaces around an ellipsis :-).

Likewise for using a space in abbreviations such as “z. B.”. Typographically it should be a half space, but a non-breaking one is much better than none at all (which, interestingly, seems to be the default in English).

It would be nice if you could translate your profile on your own, too. Currently I have a German UI with my complete profile written in English. Which doesn't matter so much for fields that have a easily-definable semantic like dates that thus can be translated too. But for free-form text it's a little weird. In fact, I would now have to consider whether I want to be found only by people in Germany who don't speak English or by everyone else. I wouldn't really want to give up either group of potential employers, to be honest. (Gebt mir den kleinen Finger und ich will die ganze Hand ... :-Þ)

Regarding “Top-Stellenangebote” and other “top” things: I don't particularly care about how you decide, but make it consistent throughout the site. A major problem I tend to see with translations, especially when made by different persons or even though crowdsourcing (which this here amounts to, in a way) is inconsistency in the terms used. The profile page has a section “Spitzenantworten” which should be changed to the same usage of “top” like in the rest of the site.

Inconsistent usage of “Stellen” and “Jobs”. E.g. “Jobs durchsuchen”, “Jobbezeichnung”, but “743 Stellen”, “Nur Stellen mit Umzugspaket” (on the search page). Choose one or the other, but not both in various different places.

@syntaxerror: Good point, I didn't even notice that one back then. I have to admit not to subject myself too much to the horrors of a poorly-translated product, so I don't even know what they fixed by now and what not ;-)
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JoeyOct 26 '13 at 8:50

/me once again...I'm wondering why that never occurred to me last year, but at least I have not forgotten about it :) I'm still a bit reluctant to write "begeistert" in German, because from its tone, it lacks quite a bit of sincerity (which, in business, should rather be too much than too few). Children may be "begeistert" about a new ride in an amusement park. So what about "Zeigen Sie uns, dass Ihre Software auch andere Menschen positiv überzeugt hat" (literally: "show us that your software has convinced other people positively, too").
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syntaxerrorJul 3 '14 at 19:02

They should, however, use a hyphen. Direct usage of English compound words (i.e. with space between the parts) is a little strange, usually. So I'd say “Usability-Tests” would be better.
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JoeyDec 14 '12 at 7:03

Email inquiries from employers" on the candidate home page just sounds wrong. An inquiry is normally a formal (judicial for example) investigation. I would write enquiry, i.e. a question.

In the FAQ, What is a Careers 2.0 Profile? section "favorite" should be favourite (and the spell-checker on MSO says so too!)

We would normally use CV or curriculum vitae instead of "resume". This is at the top and in the What is a Careers... section

On the bottom of the employer pages "Our business hours are Monday-Friday, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. GMT." The UK is currently on GMT but will move to BST (GMT +1) at the end of March; no one will pay the slightest attention to the timezone so I would remove it.

Very minor gripes:

On the My invitations tab, invitations is capitalised in the "Share your Invitations" section and nowhere else.

In /uk/employer/about-listings The price table has listing capitalised differently "# of Listings" and "Price per listing".

Lastly, and to be utterly pathetic, there's (probably) a missing a comma in "The largest, most active community of professional software developers on the internet" in /about-listings...

Can I just add thanks for formatting the London phone number correctly!

What do you mean by favorite on the about page?
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Nick Larsen♦Nov 27 '12 at 15:18

4

@NickLarsen I guess if it's localized for the UK it should be "favourite".
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BartNov 27 '12 at 15:32

If that's the case, we have not translated the UK site yet, only the German site. The UK site is mostly showing the prices in GBP, and contact info, office hours, etc to our London office. I believe it is our intent to translate the site for UK eventually, but don't hold me to it because I don't make those decisions.
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Nick Larsen♦Nov 27 '12 at 15:38

Hah no! This would translate to English as "Linked to a SE network account with more than 200 members". In the English original, it's about a link to a SE network account with more than 200 reputation. Plus, I think there are only a handful of sites belonging to the SE network that only have less or equal than 200 members! ;) So please fix this, thank you.

Now, I would expect the same behavior visiting the url "http://careers.stackoverflow.com" - or an automatic redirect to the german version, but you just the the english version without a notification about the existence of the german version.

For the UK site (and I'd imagine any other country-specific localized version), I'd love to see the "Only Telecommute Jobs?" option be restricted to the country in question (i.e. on the UK site, checking the "Only Telecommute Jobs" would show only telecommute jobs that are from UK employers).

This should, however, come with the option of widening the restriction to other countries, or the entire world.